Democrat Beto O’Rourke is creeping up on Ted Cruz in the Texas Senate race — both in fundraising and polls

A new poll by NBC News/Marist shows GOP Sen. Ted Cruz with a narrow 4-point lead over his Democratic opponent, Rep. Beto O’Rourke, putting the Congressman from El Paso remarkably close to possibly upsetting Cruz in the general election this fall.

The Cook Political Report shifted the Texas Senate race from its “likely Republican” column to its “lean Republican” classification earlier this month, saying that recent polling suggests a tighter contest between the two. Although Cruz is still favored to win, this is the first time in decades a Democrat has even come close to being elected for a Senate seat in the Lone Star State.

Both candidates are neck and neck in fundraising, with Cruz raising $23.36 million and O’Rourke raising $23.33 million so far. A key component of O’Rourke’s campaign is his pledge not to “take a dime from PACs or special interest groups.”

His campaign raised more than $10 million in the past quarter (April-June), more than double what Cruz pulled in. O’Rourke still has $13.9 million in cash on hand whereas Cruz has $9.3 million on hand after spending approximately $4 million more than O’Rourke at this point in the election cycle.

Recent polls from Quinnipiac University put O’Rourke just 6 points behind Cruz. Another poll from Texas Lyceum, with a slightly smaller sample size, had Cruz up by just 2 points — a statistical dead heat. The Real Clear Politics polling average has Beto trailing Cruz by 6.5 points. The May Quinnipiac poll, which has a 3.5-point margin of error, put O’Rourke 11 points behind Cruz, showing the race has gotten closer in the past few months.

Cruz’s biggest campaign contributions in 2017 and 2018 have come from retirees ($2.9 million), the energy and natural resources industry ($1.6 million), finance, insurance, and real estate industries ($3.5 million) and $1.6 million from ideologically motivated donors. Ideological donors are organizations or individuals that are primarily partisan or focus on a single-issue area such as abortion, the environment, gun rights or foreign policy.

According to FEC data, Cruz’s most significant campaign expenditures have been on media, advertising, political and digital consultants, fundraising phone calls and travel. His Senate campaign has spent a total of $14.6 million on the 2018 race so far.

In this campaign cycle over the past two years, the biggest donors to O’Rourke have been Democratic/Liberal organizations and individuals ($1.5 million), lawyers and lobbyists ($1.2 million), finance, insurance and real estate industries ($1.3 million) and ideological/single-issue sources ($1.7 million).

O’Rourke’s campaign funds came from tens of thousands of individual contributions, according to the campaign, which noted earlier this year that the average donation to the campaign was $25 from online donors and $40 for donations overall.

O’Rourke spent a significant amount of his campaign contributions on media, advertising, field organizing services, salaries, and t-shirts and supplies, according to FEC data. O’Rourke claims he hasn’t hired a political consultant or pollster on his campaign thus far. He has spent a total of $10 million on his campaign at this point in the 2018 election cycle.

Suffice it to say that O’Rourke has made unusual progress in a solid red state, at least when it comes to statewide offices. Whether his fundraising and political organizing will be enough to trump Cruz in November remains to be seen.

Nihal joined CRP in 2018. He's been a political reporter in Washington for the past 3 years working for various news outlets including PBS Arizona, Circa News, Inside Sources and Australian ABC News. He's been published in the Huffington Post, The Independent, USA Today and has been a guest speaker on NPR. One of his first big national stories came from digging through CRP data in 2015 and finding the largest donor to federal campaigns in Arizona, an unknown out of state parent company -- he's gotten a thrill out of tracking money in politics since. Nihal is a TCK who grew up in South Korea, Saudi Arabia, India and Singapore. He graduated from Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism with degrees in Political Science and Journalism.

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